Endowed in memory of George Michael, a founding father of the SC Conference series, the ACM IEEE-CS George Michael Memorial Fellowships honor exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high-performance computing applications, networking, storage, or large-scale data analysis using the most powerful computers that are
currently available.

About the Recipients

Harshitha Menon, UIUC

A doctoral candidate advised by Laxmikant V. Kale at UIUC, Harshitha Menon’s research focuses on scalable load-balancing algorithms and adaptive run-time techniques to improve the performance of large-scale dynamic applications. In addition, Menon works on optimizing performance for N-body codes, such as the cosmology simulation application ChaNGa. She won recognition for her paper “Scalable Load Balancing and Adaptive Run Time Techniques.” Menon is an exemplary contributor in HPC with her ability to bring to light HPC applications in science and improve research and work in HPC overall.

Menon has taken on two challenging HPC research problems—load balancing and code optimization for N-body simulations—and she is working tirelessly to solve them,” said David A. Bader, professor and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering and chair of the 2014 Fellowship Committee. “Menon’s strong collaborative work and dedication to improving HPC applications is inspiring.”

Alexander Breuer, TUM

Alexander Breuer, doctoral student at TUM, actively works on improving performance for highly resolved dynamic rupture and seismic wave simulations. Breuer pushes time-to-solution for the SeisSol software package in terms of superior numeric and high-performance optimizations. He was a member of the team to receive the PRACE award at ISC14 and he is also part of the 2014 ACM Gordon Bell Prize submission for seismic simulations, “Petascale High Order Dynamic Rupture Earthquake Simulations on Heterogeneous Supercomputers.” He won recognition for his project, “Petascale High Order Earthquake Simulations.”

By researching and simulating seismic waves, we can better identify regions exposed to severe ground motions and support engineers in planning and constructing human developments,” said Trish Damkroger, SC14 Conference Chair and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Deputy Associate Director At-Large for Computation. “We can expect great things from Breuer in HPC. His strong integration of mathematics, software development, and HPC into his work in SeisSol is truly brilliant.”

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